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Using Pope Francis’ concept of integral ecology and Wendell Berry’s critique of disconnection from land and community, the text argues that health, fulfillment, and ecological resilience are interconnected. Physical activity, nature exposure, meaningful hands-on tasks, and reduced mediation by technology are presented as practical pathways toward hope and wiser living.",{"@graph":69,"@context":122},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":45,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/religion-spirituality/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/educating-for-hope-physical-engagement-and-a-sense-of-place/430388/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/educating-for-hope-physical-engagement-and-a-sense-of-place/430388.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"วิน","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document","2026-10-01","2026-09-29",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":14},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"Why did the author start thinking about teaching by bicycling?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"After an AJCU sustainability gathering, the author questioned how to address global climate change and students’ mental wellbeing, and considered bicycling as a way to teach those connections.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"How do Pope Francis and Wendell Berry support the document’s argument?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"Pope Francis is used to frame ecological devastation and economic inequality as connected, requiring a new positive culture; Wendell Berry is cited for the harms of severing people from land, community, and subsistence, and for defining human health as a core goal.",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"What benefits of physical engagement does the author emphasize?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"The author highlights cycling and exercise’s endorphin effects, nature exposure as a natural anti-depressant, and hands-on meaningful tasks that activate reward circuits—linking these to fulfillment and hope while noting the role of technology mediation.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":124,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":126,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":128,"site_id":62},430388,1790880816,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":131},{"doc_id":128,"user_id":132,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":44,"category_name":45,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":14,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":24,"language":139,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":140,"faqs":141,"seo_title":142,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":143,"read_time":144},2336475104736,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/22000c4c5e0e5b17e70?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1786591360781797222","Educating for Hope: Physical Engagement and a Sense of Place\nKathleen R. Smythe\nMy Story\nFive years ago at another AJCU gathering on sustainability, I started to think that teaching by bicycling was the solution, or at least a solution, to the problems I faced as an educator. How did I get to that point? To thinking that riding six to 40 miles and learning about the multi-layered history of the Central Ohio River valley was a good idea for a sustainability course?\nLike most of our paths, mine was convoluted, but I was primarily worried about two things: global climate change and my students’ mental wellbeing in face of that and so many other facets of our culture that seem dehumanizing. I was also concerned about my own wellbeing, since as we learned in Chicago six months ago, we can only educate out of the “truths” or wisdom that we have discovered ourselves as we have sought to reconcile the grim ecological and economic realities with the human need for hope, narrative, and wellbeing.\nI came to be invested in more sustainable living over the past thirty years through farming and bicycling. I did my graduate work in Madison Wisconsin where I rode my bicycle twelve months out of the year and came to love it. I came to farming and gardening deeply concerned about the quality of the food in the grocery store after my first child was born. But there were significant unintended consequences to both choices: I was putting my body in service to a higher goal, sustainability, yes, but with massive positive implications for my wellbeing far beyond physical health. I wanted to find a way to help my students realize the same benefits.\nA Positive Vision\nPope Francis has helped us to see that the twin problems of ecological devastation and economic inequality come from the same source: hypercapitalism. It is not just an economy any more but a culture, a way of life. We live as capitalists from sunup to sundown, consuming experiences, food, energy, and relationships. So we need a different way of living, orienting to the world, a different culture and set of hegemonic ideas, in order to solve both problems. But this different way must be a positive vision: a sense of where we are going instead of what we are leaving behind.\nPope Francis calls for an “integral ecology” based on the life of St. Francis of Assisi. He writes that St. Francis’ “response to the world around him was so much more than intellectual appreciation or economic calculus, for him each and every creature was a sister united to him by bonds of affection (11).” Pope Francis notes a wide variety of ways in which humans are suffering due to our ecological crises: lack of contact with nature; lack of access to places of beauty; lack of employment; growing inequality and violence; and weak politics due to the influence of technology and finance. He continues that—due to the omnipresence of digital media-- people are not “learning how to live wisely, to think deeply and to love generously” (47, 54). As a solution, he urges a new culture, an ecological culture, that promotes an integral ecology and “cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources (111).”\nWendell Berry’s Unsettling of America, written in the early 1970s, is very much in line with much of Pope Francis’ writing. Berry’s book is a wide-ranging look at the impact of the destruction of small-scale family farms on communities, families, marriage, soil, and politics. Among other things, he argues that the disconnection of families from a particular place and from forms of subsistence production has rendered Americans helpless and depressed. At the very end of his book, he writes that the goal of human existence should be health—health of individual humans, health of their communities and health of their ecosystems, particularly the soils upon which they depend for their food.\nHealth, fulfillment, communities, ","cbCaikdwXxTzvX1c","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaikdwXxTzvX1c","docx",25439,"English","# My Story\n# A Positive Vision\n## Integral ecology and hypercapitalism\n## Integral ecology and suffering in digital life\n# Physical Engagement\n## Endorphins and positive effects of cycling\n## Nature exposure and forest bathing\n## Meaningful hands-on work and reward circuits","[{\"question\":\"Why did the author start thinking about teaching by bicycling?\",\"answer\":\"After an AJCU sustainability gathering, the author questioned how to address global climate change and students’ mental wellbeing, and considered bicycling as a way to teach those connections.\"},{\"question\":\"How do Pope Francis and Wendell Berry support the document’s argument?\",\"answer\":\"Pope Francis is used to frame ecological devastation and economic inequality as connected, requiring a new positive culture; Wendell Berry is cited for the harms of severing people from land, community, and subsistence, and for defining human health as a core goal.\"},{\"question\":\"What benefits of physical engagement does the author emphasize?\",\"answer\":\"The author highlights cycling and exercise’s endorphin effects, nature exposure as a natural anti-depressant, and hands-on meaningful tasks that activate reward circuits—linking these to fulfillment and hope while noting the role of technology mediation.\"}]","Educating for Hope - Physical Engagement and a Sense of Place | DOCX",1790652688,13]